Welcome to another episode of the ground-breaking and wonderful Sauropods of 2008 series. Yay! As I’m fond of pointing out, new dinosaurs do not only come from China, or South America: Europe continues to yield surprises.
Do you want to know how stupid my co-blogger Matt Wedel is? Having already discussed the ostrich Struthio camelus in Wedel et al. (2000b), that total idiot went on to misspell the trivial name as “ camellus ” in Wedel and Cifelli (2005:52). What a doofus. And do you want to know how dumb my other co-blogger Darren Naish is?
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A while back, Matt speculated on the size of the allegedly giant mamenchisaurid Hudiesaurus . At the time, all he had to go on was Glut’s (2000) reproduction of half of Dong (1997:fig. 3), and a scalebar whose length was given incorrectly.
If you woke up this morning and thought, “Global warming is on the rise, amphibians are in a race to see who can go extinct first, the economy is in the toilet, any day now my boss will discover that I don’t actually do anything at work, and my blog will never have the eclectic cachet of SV-POW!, but at least Mike Taylor doesn’t have a Ph.D. ,” then it is my happy duty to ruin your day. Mike defended today, successfully.
Here’s your new t-shirt/sticker/desktop wallpaper. Tell the world. OMG! WTF? Was I asleep? Had I slept? Did I miss something? Does paleontological training destroy the part of the brain that knows how to use a freakin’ tape measure? Are paleontologists incapable of imagining that others might want to make meaningful comparisons with their taxa?
Because of my work on the recent Cetiosaurus petition, I’m on the ICZN mailing list. Apart from the brutally technical threads on specific nomenclatural cases, the favourite topics of that mailing list are electronic publication and in particular the long-term preservation on anything not printed onto compressed plant matter.
Here’s another article in my ‘sauropods of 2008’ series. Previous entries have looked at Eomamenchisaurus and Dongyangosaurus , both of which are Asian. This time round we look at a new South American taxon: Malarguesaurus florenciae González Riga et al ., 2008. In marked contrast to the majority of recent SV-POW! articles, this article really is going to be short!
Quick story: in 1993, Jacobs et al. described the basal titanosaur Malawisaurus based on reasonably complete material from, you guessed it, Malawi. This was kind of a big deal, in that Malawisaurus was at the time the most complete sauropod from the Cretaceous of Africa, and also provided important information on titanosaur skulls.
Today saw the publication of the most startlingly dull paper I’ve ever been involved in (Upchurch et al. 2009) — and remember, I write this as co-author of a paper on the phylogenetic taxonomy of Diplodocoidea. Not only that, but one time when I was practising a conference talk with my wife Fiona as audience, she fell asleep actually while I was speaking. Actually asleep.
As Matt frequently reminds me, it’s now nearly five years since I started to work on “The Archbishop”, more formally known as BMNH R5973, the Natural History Museum’s long-neglected Tendaguru brachiosaur. This is, or at least once was, one of the most complete brachiosaurid specimens ever discovered — although quite a bit of the material has gone missing or remains unprepared.